Wednesday, October 21, 2009

There was something terribly familiar about the rage Sakarra observed in the young Betazoid, and yet a part of her could not help but wonder … ‘He’s ashamed for THAT?’

But it was not her place to judge. The Cyrin that was shaking with grief and hatred, lost in his own memories, and the Cyrin that was reliving all this with remorse and fear were both looking towards the image of the young Vulcan who stood calmly observing the events unfolding before her.

“You felt justified in your anger and yet you experience regret.” she said to the young Betazoid, noting with an elegantly quirked brow that in his mind she appeared very much as she was sitting in her quarters on Charon - a Vulcan clad in flowing robes, standing in the middle of events and yet removed from them. “And now you fear that I might recoil from what I’ve seen. But it is not the Vulcan way to deny truth, Cyrin Dicari.” Slowly extending an arm towards the memory of the doctor, she continued “Is it your hatred which you regret, or is it rather the actions which followed your inability to contain it?”

He looked at Sakarra, shocked in a way that she hadn’t rejected his emotion. “I fear many thing Sakarra,” he answered wiping his face with his hands to rid it of the moistness left by his tears. “Hatred…an emotion that I have in abundance, an emotion that I can control but cannot control. But I regret my actions. I shouldn’t have hit Doctor Tamanaka, he was only ‘trying’ to help. I fear what I am capable of doing to other people. I hurt him,” he said referring to the doctor “I hurt my mother, I fear my ability to hurt other people.” He let out a sigh, “That is why I don’t let people get close to me. Why I dislike others touching my mind, I am a monster.” He answered in a monotone voice. “Why are you helping me out Sakarra, excluding the obvious of my asking for your help?” He wanted to know. It had been confirmed earlier that she trusted him, and he trusted her. But with trust doesn’t always come help. He trusted Shiarrael to not get him killed, per say. But the Commodore wasn’t someone that he could turn to for help either.

“A ‘monster’? It is my experience that people who refer to themselves as such, usually are not.” Sakarra stated mildly. “Your question is valid. Although I should point out, that the simple fact of having been asked to render assistance is usually sufficient for a Vulcan to do just that.” The young woman standing in the frozen, misty memory of a hospital lightyears away definitely showed … expressions … on her face that the flesh and blood Sakarra hardly ever would. A tinge of sadness, definitive concern, and a sort of mild, melancholic humor. “C’thia, that which people usually translate as ’logic’ but would slightly better be rendered as ’Reality-Truth’, is what compels me to help, Cyrin Dicari. A Betazoid unable to ‘see’ the universe they way he is meant to experience it, is therefore unable to understand it’s true nature. The only thing more illogical than that is a Betazoid unable to see the truth about himself.” As the real Sakarra would, her image in the young Betazoid’s mind tilted her head thoughtfully “It is my choice and my right to help you, Cyrin. And if by doing so I can slow entropy, it is ‘worth’ whatever minor discomfort I may experience.”

A slight wave of her hand let the memory fade away and showed Cyrin another, conjured from the young Vulcan’s mind. “Do not believe you are the only one capable of inflicting pain.”

Suddenly, there was only the noise of a small fighter’s engine, racing madly through star filled darkness, throwing itself against a looming bulk ahead, deadly in all it’s elegance. The comm system provided nothing but an eerie silence, but the pilot did not need it to know the minds of her fellows or that of her kin on the crippled ship still showing at the periphery of her vision.‘No, ko-kan.’‘I welcome a better suggestion, s’thora.’Already she was turning the fighter’s nose towards the giant ship with it’s gleaming hull, her sharp eyes discerning the point at which an impact would do the greatest amount of damage.

Despite the rage burning within, the barely controlled fire that threatened to consume the last shred of reason and clear thought, the little pilot felt the surge of heart-wrenching grief pouring from the minds around her. And worse than that, the pain emanating from the one who was her kin but whom she had so pointedly called ‘Captain’ to reinforce her point that here and now, duty superseded family. Or did it?

‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few… or the one.’Or was that, too, merely an excuse to throw all her rage at this enemy, this haunting shadow that was so sure of it’s superiority, so infuriatingly insulting, it made her wish to rattle that smugness, to laugh in the face of it only once, and be it at the cost of her own life?

Did it matter?

Difficult as it was, Sakarra did not hide any of the … thoughts, sensations, … emotions … from the other consciousness sharing her mind. Not the burning fury, the defiant laughter, or the sorrow of the others that was as fresh and clear to her now as it had been then. The only concession she made was shielding Cyrin’s empathic senses from the true, terrible depth of the anger. As a Betazoid he might lose himself in it, suffer the onslaught with an intensity that his already unsettled mind would find … horrifying. And that, too, was something she’d had to learn ‘the hard way’.

As the memory slowly faded around them, Sakarra breathed slowly and forced herself to calm. “Since I am obviously still here, you may surmise my kinswoman insisted on me at least attempting to save myself. And I did so, following my Captain’s orders, despite protesting that it might cost valuable time or worse, give the other ship a chance to thwart my plan. Do I regret the sorrow I caused them? Yes. Is there any excuse for it? No.” “C’thia, Cyrin Dicari, means among other things not to shy away from the truth. And the truth is, they knew all too well that at that moment I could not have cared less. About my life or their grief. That, more than anything, is the burden I have to accept.”

Vague and without substance, the hospital reappeared, the young Vulcan standing on little more than a thin layer of shiny floor. “You fear your ability to hurt others. Most of all, those you love. Truth and Reality is, that ability is within you. Denying it is what gives it power. Accepting it is what gives you a choice.”

Feeling her emotions, he thought he understood that everyone is capable of hurting someone, whether it be someone they love or someone that wasn’t important to them. He nodded, very shocked at Sakarra, but not leaving or trying to push her out of his mind. Not that he could. “I couldn’t bear the possibility of losing my father. I may embrace the Betazoid part of me, but he is my father. I shouldn’t have hit Doctor Tamanaka. I can’t change that, but how can I embrace that? Embrace something that I despise and disgusts me…how?” He asked Sakarra as he looked at himself frozen in time. The urge to hide the memory was still strong. ‘Vulcan logic was so confusing,’ he thought to himself.

“There is a difference between accepting and embracing, Cyrin Dicari.” Sensing the shock she had caused within the young Betazoid’s mind, Sakarra evoked another memory, only this time they were standing in the gardens of T’Shen monastery. A fierce sun was burning in the sky, but the walled courtyard was peaceful and quiet. Only the sound of small fountains and the distant murmuring of voices broke the silence while a blue-feathered bird perched on a hardy desert tree cocked it’s head at something on the ground. Immediately she felt her own mind settle, any anger or sadness dispersing like fog under Nevasa’s relentless light.

“When one is lost in a turbulent ocean as you are, there are many choices. One can embrace the storm, embrace one’s fate and thus invite death. One can fight, defy the ocean and either emerge wounded and weary, or drown after all. Or one can accept the situation for what it is and move beyond it. The ocean is the ocean. The storm is the storm. Kaiidth. What is, is.” She looked up at the cloudless sky that stretched over them like a shining copper bowl and a warm smile tugged at the young Vulcan’s lips, despite the brief surge of homesickness that echoed through the mindlink. “The question that remains is: Will you let the memory of things past and the fear of things that may be control that which you are? Or will you decide to acknowledge that ocean and accept that it must exist for you to be whole? One need not drown in the waters to know they are real, Cyrin.”

She returned her focus to the young Betazoid, whose feelings of being lost and confused still lingered about him like the morning mist in the Vathax mountains. “You asked me ‘How’, and the answer to that is hardly ever simple. The first step however is to realize the Why. Do you despise the fear of losing your father or the actions it drove you to? Or are you disgusted by the abstract notion of what you perceive yourself to be?”